Social Deprivation and Poverty in the City of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul: Analysis from Popular Peripheries of High Social Deprivation

Spode, Pedro Leonardo Cezar; Faria, Rivaldo

doi:10.14393/SN-v37-2025-75531

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Papers • Soc. nat. 37 • 2025 • https://doi.org/10.14393/SN-v37-2025-75531x linkcopy

Social Deprivation and Poverty in the City of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul: Analysis from Popular Peripheries of High Social Deprivation

Authorship SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

Abstract

Urban Geography has utilized various concepts over the last century to study urban poverty, such as segregation, exclusion, marginality, and more recently, social vulnerability. However, very little has been produced in Brazilian Geography regarding social deprivation as a concept for analyzing poverty, especially urban poverty. In this sense, the objective of this article is to present and discuss fragments of urban poverty present in the city of Santa Maria, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, referred to as popular peripheries of high social deprivation. The methodological procedures were operationalized using secondary and primary data, organized and mapped in a Geographic Information System. Secondary data were obtained from the municipal departments of Social Development and Housing and Land Regularization, as well as the Planning Institute of Santa Maria. Data from the Social Deprivation Index were also used, constructed from the 2010 Census data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Primary data were collected through 19 fieldwork sessions conducted between 2020 and 2024 across all urban neighborhoods of the city. Seven fragments of poverty in the urban territory of Santa Maria were defined, referred to as popular peripheries of high social deprivation. These high social deprivation peripheries territorially reveal urban poverty in the city through the limitation or complete absence of resources and structures necessary for social development. Poverty, therefore, is derived from multiple deprivations, at different levels, expressed territorially for Santa Maria through the popular peripheries of high social deprivation.

Keywords:
Socio-spatial inequalities; Urban Geography; Roughnesses

Modes of use of territory	Description
I) Predominant land uses	Most relevant aspects regarding residential, industrial, commercial and service uses, institutional uses, and multiple uses. According to Faria (2012, p. 315), in this category, “it is also important to highlight the population and housing density of each area and observation points, respectively.”
II) Housing conditions	Description of residential occupation modes. It is important to identify whether or not the housing is precarious, as well as the spatial homogeneity of housing modes (Faria, 2012).
III) Socio-environmental conditions	Description of general environmental conditions: afforestation, garbage, noise, presence of flooding, proximity to rivers and slopes, sewage system, water supply. It is important to associate physical-environmental conditions with housing, given that the occupation of hills or slopes, for example, will not always be done by low-income populations. “What determines the modes and places of occupation is the dynamics inherent to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production of urban territory. It should be noted that environmental conditions are first and foremost social conditions, and this association must be sought” (Faria, 2012, p. 316).
IV) Infrastructure conditions	Conditions of urban facilities such as paved and unpaved streets, presence of public facilities such as schools, squares and green areas, and health services. Also the presence of transport facilities such as stations, airports, passenger and cargo areas, and so on.
V) Speed and slowness	“It is important to observe the capacity that each point has to accommodate these vectors, although this is not an easy task” (Faria, 2012, p. 317). The spaces of speed, as Santos (2006) states, are characterized by being command centers, and therefore occupy a prominent place in the territorial division of labor. In other words, spaces of speed are reproduced, most of the time, through the actions of verticality, whose activities are determined externally, from outside and from afar (Santos, 2006). Spaces of slowness, in turn, house logics linked to horizontality, which is determined by relations of contiguity. In slow spaces, technique and science are less concentrated than in spaces of speed. This is associated with Milton Santos' slow men, who are the poor men of the city.

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[TFN2] Source: The authors (2024).